About this exhibition

Klara Lidén’s solo exhibition at WIELS is her first institutional presentation in Belgium. It comprises new and existing works in a range of media, with an emphasis on video and installation. Occupying the first floor gallery spaces, the exhibition is structured to create a variety of tempos, drawing the visitor slowly into Lidén’s intense interior world.

Influenced by street art, informed by conceptual art, and tinged with vandalism, her creative process takes many forms. Her materials are taken from her immediate urban environment and her subjects from her own experience of living as an individual in a crowd.

In her videos, Lidén often appears alone against the backdrop of a cityscape. It is as if she inhabits a different time zone, or operates at a different speed from the rest of society. For example, for her 2014 video Warm up, she filmed herself rehearsing with the ballet corps of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, clumsily attempting to copy the graceful moves of the ballerinas as they plier across the stage.

Lidén’s practice also comprises works made from recuperated materials. Her ongoing series Poster Paintings (2007-) are wall-mounted works made from layers of posters pasted atop one another, which she takes from the street, blocking out the top image with a white rectangle. Highlighting the omnipresence of advertising in public space, while also referencing post-minimalist painting, they are enigmatic objects, equally at home in a gallery space or the urban landscape.

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28.10.2015

Public opening of the exhibition Battement battu by Klara Lidén, with a concert by Tvillingarna.
Founded in Stockholm in 2006, Tvillingarna have worked together with Klara Lidén to make the music...
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02.12.2015

The Swedish, Berlin-based artist and poet Karl Holmqvist is a longstanding friend of Klara Lidén and has previously written about her work. This autumn they are collaborating together on a new...
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06.01.2016

Hilde de Bruijn explores the work of Klara Lidén through the lens of Asger Jorn’s writings and his ideas on vandalism in art. De Bruijn is curator at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen...
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